February 28, 2006

"I don't really care about this autistic situation, really. It's just the way I am. The advice I'd give to autistic people is just keep working, just keep dreaming, you'll get your chance and you'll do it."

Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA - a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association...

Who on earth could have known that Osama bin Laden wanted to attack us by flying planes into buildings? Any official who bothered to read the trellis of pre-9/11 intelligence briefs.

Who on earth could have known that an American invasion of Iraq would spawn a brutal insurgency, terrorist recruiting boom and possible civil war? Any official who bothered to read the C.I.A.'s prewar reports.

Who on earth could have known that New Orleans's sinking levees were at risk from a strong hurricane? Anybody who bothered to read the endless warnings over the years about the Big Easy's uneasy fishbowl.

In June 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, fretted to The Times-Picayune in New Orleans: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

Not only was the money depleted by the Bush folly in Iraq; 30 percent of the National Guard and about half its equipment are in Iraq.

Ron Fournier of The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans last year. The White House carved it to about $40 million. But President Bush and Congress agreed to a $286.4 billion pork-filled highway bill with 6,000 pet projects, including a $231 million bridge for a small, uninhabited Alaskan island....

....Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA - a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association - admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.

Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."(New York Times)

A 28-year-old South Korean man died of exhaustion in an Internet cafe after playing computer games non-stop for 49 hours

Lee, a resident in the southern city of Taegu who was identified only by his last name, collapsed Friday after having eaten minimally and not sleeping, refusing to leave his keyboard while he played the battle simulation game Starcraft.

Lee was quickly moved to a hospital but died after a few hours, due to what doctors are presuming was a heart attack, police said.

Lee had been fired from his job last month because he kept missing work to play computer games, police said.(AP via Washington Post)

July 13, 2005

what Rove's leak and Novak's column really exposed was the depravity of the administration's deliberate use of a false WMD threat and its willingness to go after anyone willing to tell the truth about it.

"We lack specific information on many key aspects of Iraq's WMD (weapons of mass destruction) programs. ... We have low confidence in our ability to assess when Saddam would use WMD," the nation's intelligence agencies concluded in a National Intelligence Estimate in October 2002.

In another caveat that was delivered to the president and his top advisers in the same document, State Department intelligence officials disagreed with the conclusion that Iraq had tried to buy uranium for nuclear weapons in Africa.

Bush nevertheless repeated that assertion in his State of the Union speech a few months later. The White House later retracted the allegation.

Cheney was even more definitive in his accusations against Saddam.

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," the vice president said in August 2002.

Silberman said the commission had no authority to consider how policy-makers used intelligence that was sent to them during the buildup to war. When pressed, he suggested that the president was misled by a steady stream of information that exaggerated the threat.

"We looked at the flow, or the stream of intelligence that came to the White House. ... If anything, it was even more alarmist," he said.

The issue may never be aired fully. The Senate Intelligence Committee appears to have dropped a second stage of its own investigation that was to have focused on the administration's use of intelligence. (Knight-Ridder)

what some have called "the greatest scientific instrument since the invention of the very first telescope" will be left to decay and fail.

The US space agency (Nasa) has made it clear it will not service the observatory again and what some have called "the greatest scientific instrument since the invention of the very first telescope" will be left to decay and fail. (BBC)